Even Sprint Beat AT&T and Verizon in Customer Growth (cnet.com)

Customers are turning to Sprint again. From a report on CNET: In fact, they're starting to look to the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier over stalwarts like AT&T and Verizon Wireless. The company said it added 405,000 net new post-paid subscribers -- people who pay at the end of the month and tend to be more loyal. Of that total, 368,000 were phone customers, Sprint's highest rate of growth in four years. The numbers suggest Sprint is starting to pull itself out of a death spiral, reversing years of losses, customers faced with poor service and a network that lagged behind the competition. Sprint's customer growth came at a time when all the carriers were aggressive with holiday promotions. It's a trend that will likely continue, resulting in more potential deals for consumers. "Sprint is turning the corner," CEO Marcelo Claure said in the company's fiscal third-quarter report on Tuesday.

Comments

Simple and straightforward reason for this.

[olsmeister]

This must be the reason. It's the only thing that makes sense!

They need to fix their network

[Lumpy]

Only reason I stick with AT&T is their 4G LTE coverage and the civilized function of being able to use DATA whine in a call. Verizon and their archaic system that disallows data during a call needs to be thrown out.

Problem is Sprint uses the same technology as Verizon.

Re:They need to fix their network

[cdrudge]

Is there really a use case for having data while in a phone call?

Load a document, discuss an email that was just sent, review an image for approval, look up nearby restaurants to decide where to eat lunch, put in an online order for carry out as your wife tells you what she wants over the phone...

They're all things that I've done in the recent past and I'm hardly a power business cell phone user. Sure they all could have been done by ending the call, performing whatever task, then calling back. But why not do it while they're on the line if you can?

Re:They need to fix their network

[mcrbids]

I think your facts need updating. As a Verizon customer, I can use data during calls and have been able to do so for years. It's true that you can't use data during a voice call if you're on a 3G tower, but the only place I see those anymore is while at government offices.

Re:They need to fix their network

[fahrbot-bot]

Is there really a use case for having data while in a phone call?

I imagine the practical use cases are few, but I have seen a co-worker use Google Maps while on a call productively.

Re:They need to fix their network

[squiggleslash]

CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war

No, it didn't. The word CDMA can be two things: a mobile phone standard (IS-95 and its successors), and a type of technology.

GSM is a family of mobile phone standards.

So if GSM and CDMA got into a war, you must be comparing GSM with IS-95 and its successors. IS-95 is mostly dead. Sprint and Verizon still operate legacy networks, but they're transitioning to the latest version of GSM, which is called LTE.

GSM used TDMA..

The first iteration of GSM originally used TDMA. Version "3", UMTS, used W-CDMA, whose low level protocols (not high level protocols) are similar to IS-95 (etc)'s low level protocols. At a high level, however, the two standards are completely unalike. Version 4 of GSM, LTE, uses OFDMA and SC-FDMA at the lowest levels, which are not remotely similar to anything in IS-95 or its successor.

All mobile phone operators in the US right now are transitioning to LTE, a GSM standard. CDMA - both the mobile phone standard (IS-95 etc) and the air interface technology are considered obsolete, and the two remaining major operators of IS-95/etc networks are moving off it.

All of you hating on CDMA should actually be thanking it. If the U.S. hadn't allowed CDMA to compete...

Yeah yeah. That fucking idiot Steve DeBeste posted this libercrapian propaganda for the longest time, it was wrong when he said it, and it's wrong now. There was never a ban on CDMA systems outside of the US, or even in the EU. Vodafone actually experimented with it in the UK, deciding it was inferior (because it was) to conventional GSM.

Qualcomm's lobbying, and the US's lobbying on behalf of it, actually held the industry back. The lobbying pretty much forced the 3GPP designing UMTS to include a CDMA air interface, rather than jump straight to more capable protocols based upon OFDMA. We could have had much more power efficient devices with better latency and more scalability 10-15 years ago, but Qualcomm decided it was a giant conspiracy that nobody wanted their system outside of cost-cutting US carriers.